


a fingertip pressed against a mirror

by wishtheworst



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 20:22:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20645120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishtheworst/pseuds/wishtheworst
Summary: When his nerve endings were still good for something, Nathan could watch Duke for what felt like hours that he spent imagining what it would be like to press him into a mattress or taste every corner of his mouth. He imagined reading the contours of Duke’s body in a secret language of touch and how that would finally reveal something about him Nathan could understand.Now he could read it at his leisure, devoid of the influence that feeling might have on his interpretation.





	a fingertip pressed against a mirror

Duke was beautiful, enough so that Nathan wondered if touching him would be overwhelming if he could feel. He never had the nerve to do it when he could, not the way he wanted. He found safe alternatives: a hand on Duke’s shoulder, his arm slung around Duke’s neck, their knees bumping under a table. Still, the idea that he would let Duke overwhelm him, if Duke would let him, was always there.

When his nerve endings were still good for something, Nathan could watch Duke for what felt like hours that he spent imagining what it would be like to press him into a mattress or taste every corner of his mouth. He imagined reading the contours of Duke’s body in a secret language of touch and how that would finally reveal something about him Nathan could understand. 

Now he could read it at his leisure, devoid of the influence that feeling might have on his interpretation. Nathan didn’t flatter himself with the assumption of objectivity – he had never been and would never be objective where Duke was concerned. But there was a sort of distance thanks to the absence of feeling, like the artificial space between a fingertip pressed against a mirror and its reflection. In that space, Nathan was as close as he would ever get to seeing Duke clearly.

It was probably hot, too hot inside and out – summer started early that year and everyone said it was relentless. The hum of fans filled every inch of the station and air conditioners growled across town. The Rouge was quiet in comparison, the stillness a reprieve from the constant noise that faded out for everyone else after the first few minutes. Not for Nathan, not with his oversensitive, overcompensating senses. If it was hot in the recesses of the boat, if the air hung thick between them with humidity and the weakest salt breeze from the water, he had no idea. At least it was quiet.

He couldn’t feel it, not really, but there was something _different_ that made him sure Duke’s hair was sweat-damp close to his scalp, like it would be after Nathan was done with him.

He couldn’t feel it, but his hands ran up through Duke’s hair anyway to let it loose from the elastic band that held it back. Nathan liked his hair long, always had. It’d been long when they were kids, longer by the time Nathan graduated high school and Duke didn’t. He wanted his hands in it then, dark strands twisted around his fingers and pulled tight. When Duke came back from wherever it was he’d gone to see the world, it was shorter, but no less inviting. Now it curled against his collar and brushed Nathan’s fingers as he pushed Duke’s shirt off his shoulders.

Nathan was never sure why Duke let him undress him one piece of clothing at a time and handle him like something rare, something breakable. Something that might be fun to break under the right conditions. The first time he stalled at the beginning, clumsily undoing buttons and losing his nerve at the first glimpse of collarbone. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen Duke’s skin before, because he was always on display with what Nathan assumed as a total lack of awareness. Or not quite that – a total lack of awareness that Nathan was watching the same way everyone else was.

So Nathan watched the muscles in Duke’s back and shoulders glide together in a maddening interplay as he loaded crates into the hold of the boat, a sheen of sweat on his skin glazing the beginnings of a sunburn. He fought the urge to reach across the bar and button at least two buttons, maybe more. He’d stood no more than twelve intolerable inches from him in the showers in school and hoped to god he seemed to be staring at anything else at all. Nathan watched so long and so intently that somehow, almost two decades after he looked the first time, Duke noticed. When he did, it finally occurred to Nathan that the only reason he got away with it for so long was because Duke was trying his hardest not to get caught too.

Even after all of that watching and waiting, Nathan still lost his nerve the first time, and the second, and Duke let it go, let him try again until he got it right.

If Duke had any idea about the mess of thoughts that circled and clashed in Nathan’s head, it didn’t show, and he let Nathan push him onto his bed without protest or comment. His lazy, easy smile felt like mockery everywhere else, and it stung harder than anything he could’ve said, though not for lack of trying. It was different with just the two of them, although it always had been to some degree. Duke with Nathan wasn’t quite Duke and Nathan and the rest of the world. Something about that snagged on the small part of Nathan’s brain that wasn’t overpowered and short-circuited to nothing more than a dull, echoing thrum of _want_, begging him to interrogate it for even a second.

He had plenty of time to question himself, Duke, and everything about this when he was alone. Instead, Nathan let his world narrow to what Duke’s neck might have felt like under his lips, tendons strung tight and a fluttering pulse. It was enough to watch his head fall back with the press of Nathan’s mouth at the hollow of his throat and to hear the rough pull of breath that followed the sting of teeth. 

It had to be, because that was all there was going to be. Nathan had squandered the rest and had to make a feast of the scraps.

Duke never touched him, not even a cursory skim of hands or a tightening grip. Not even what would’ve constituted a polite show of enthusiasm. Duke never tried to kiss him, and Nathan was grateful to a degree that bordered on humiliating, because he had no idea how he would manage it without making a messy fool of himself. Most of Nathan’s clothes stayed on, and Duke did him the inestimable courtesy of not asking him to perform what he would’ve felt if he could.

Nathan tried not to let himself dwell on what Duke would do if things were different.

“What does it feel like?” The way Duke’s breath caught as Nathan’s touch grazed his hipbones and ghosted over the soft skin inside his thighs was answer enough, but he wanted to hear it. He wanted the words and the way Duke’s voice dropped to a ragged depth that should have vibrated through Nathan’s bones and burned something to ash inside him.

Duke stretched into the contact, eyes heavy lidded and yet still somehow locked on Nathan’s with a relentless insistence that wouldn’t end until this did. “Warm, everything is warm. But your hands are hotter. They always are.” The words stumbled across his lips as if it was a challenge to do anything more than thrust into Nathan’s hand. “Your fucking hands, Nathan. I can feel the gun calluses on your hands.”

“Yeah? That’s good?” Nathan knew the answer, but he asked anyway for the simple pleasure of watching Duke fight for words and air, struggle and fail and struggle again because Nathan wanted him to.

“Yeah.” Duke cursed under his breath, teeth sinking into his lip and eyes snapping shut when Nathan moved faster, let the pad of his thumb brush just beneath the head of Duke’s cock on the upward stroke. “That’s extremely good. Keep doing that.”

That he could feel, the raw plea in Duke’s voice that didn’t quite rise to the level of begging, but didn’t exactly shy away from it either. Duke would, if he asked – Nathan was sure of it. If a little pleading was the cost of this, Duke would pay. And Nathan would pay too, he knew that, although he hadn’t worked out the exact currency or the expense yet.

He hadn’t worked it out and didn’t want to. Instead Nathan did as Duke asked, slipping down cautiously to stretch out alongside him as if Duke might push him away. If he could feel Duke’s skin pressed against him like this, even through layers of clothes, it would be too much. He reached for the pieces in his head from fragments of memory and fantasy to imagine it instead, the August heat in June and the damp press of humid air, the constant twitch and flex of Duke tensing and shifting against him, the slick glide of their skin that was at least audible, if not tangible.

The one thing Nathan could have, feeling or no feeling, was the quiet pleasure of watching Duke fall apart. He turned his face into Nathan’s shoulder when he came, shivering against him in the aftermath before going slack and unbound in the same way his loose-jointed movements always suggested.

For the smallest fraction of a second, Nathan would swear he could feel breath on his skin and the vibrating pulse of Duke coming down from a fever pitch to a comfortable blankness. It was all in his head, because it had to be, the physical equivalent of the afterimage of bright light that stayed visible even with his eyes squeezed shut. But for a single moment, everything inside him would swear it was real.

It was awful and wonderful and terrifying and giddying, and Nathan could never tell if he wanted it to be real more than he was afraid of what that would mean.

After what felt like forever, Nathan made himself stir just enough to communicate he was going to leave without saying the words. Duke made a noncommittal noise, half “don’t go” and half “you can stay if you want,” but he didn’t object further when it was obvious Nathan’s mind was made up.

Nathan knew he could stay. Duke wouldn’t offer if he didn’t mean it because neither of them expected it. He would’ve been lying if he said he never thought about it. But Nathan couldn’t let himself drift off in the same proximity that confused and tormented what was left of his synapses.

Nathan trusted Duke not to touch him, but it was all too easy to imagine curious fingertips skimming the rise of his cheekbone or grazing the sliver of skin between the hem of a T-shirt and the waist of jeans. It was easy to imagine those things because Nathan did, constantly. But there was no part of him that could make peace with wasting Duke’s touch, whether it was on indifferent skin or absent consciousness.


End file.
